Co-Orientation Theory

The original source of co-orientation theory is an article written by Theodore M. Newcomb, published in the Psychological Review in 1953, under the title “An Approach to the Study of Communicative Acts.” Newcomb outlined his framework of analysis in this way: Communication, in its essence, serves two ends, to establish a common orientation of two (or more) individuals with respect to each other and, simultaneously, to link them to a shared object of concern. The originality of his conception resides in this recognition of interpersonal adaptation as mediated by a joint interest in the state of an objective world, one that communicators are mutually connected to and by. Interaction is now seen through a new lens, that of some aspect of the world to which more than one person orients. This idea of social interaction contrasted with the then popular mathematical theory of communication associated with Claude Shannon, commonly called information theory, which concentrated on information quantities in messages and how to encode messages most efficiently in linking a source to a destination. Shannon and his colleagues had denuded messages of reference to interaction. Newcomb's innovation served to correct this abstraction from ordinary reality by reestablishing communicative acts as embedded within both a social and a material reality.

In taking this step, Newcomb was reflecting the influence of his mentor, Kurt Lewin, one of the great innovators in social psychology of the first part of the 20th century. Lewin came out of the tradition of Gestalt theory, and thus his attention was focused less on intrapersonal psychological states and more on how individuals fit themselves into fields of internal and external influences that are both social and material in nature. Newcomb's innovation was to systematize this perception by mapping it onto a simple model that he called an A-B-X system: two individuals, A and B, and one object, X. The resulting triadic unit, he noted, could be regarded from two different perspectives, either that of the participants themselves, as seen from within their respective life spaces (a phenomenal view that sees attitudes as a state of mind), or that of an external observer for whom the whole A-B-X system is in view. Newcomb then identified what he called a system. An instance of communication can be depicted as an A-to-B-re-X system, in which A communicates with B about X. For example, professor and student communicate with one another about some aspect of the history of Canada. What the system amounts to, beyond an interpersonal relationship or a common group membership, however, remained largely unexplored in his essay. He did not probe the organizational implications of co-orientation, and yet presumably in any moderately complex system, there are many concurrent instances of A to B re X (people speaking to people about topics of mutual interest). How they link to each other to compose a more complex system of communicative acts was left to later theorists to elaborate.

Newcomb did probe, to some extent, the unfolding dynamic of A-B-X relationships. The key factor, as he saw it, is attitude, although his article appeared before the word attitude became identified as a strictly cognitive state. In earlier work, it [Page 204]also meant something closer to the positioning of someone in an encounter, or a visible orientation. Attitudes might be positive or negative, A to B, B to A, A and/or B to X. In our example, the professor and student have attitudes toward one another, and they have attitudes toward the historical topic of mutual interest. Co-orientation, which is to say the lining up of attitudinal orientations in a compatible way, is an essential aspect of human life.

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